Reclaiming the Body at the End: Women, Deathwork, and the Radical Freedom of Decomposition

Long before hospitals, funeral homes, and sealed caskets, death lived in the home.

And women were the ones closest to it.

Just as women have historically been closest to birth—as those who give birth and those who once guided it as midwives and caregivers—we were also the ones who tended the dying, washed the dead, and shepherded families through grief. Death was not outsourced. It was intimate, embodied, and communal. This labor, like so much care work, was largely invisible, unpaid, and profoundly human.

Today, we might call this role an end-of-life doula or death doula—a non-medical companion who supports people and families emotionally, spiritually, and practically through dying and early grief. While the title is modern, the work is ancient, and it has deep roots in women’s bodies and hands. [inelda.org], [inelda.org]

Men have always been part of deathcare too—but historically, often as the muscle. Digging graves. Building coffins. Transporting bodies. The word undertaker itself comes from the idea of someone who “undertook” the logistics.

That balance shifted dramatically in the mid-19th century. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his embalmed body was transported across the country for public viewing. The visibility of his preserved body helped normalize embalming during and after the Civil War, especially as families sought to bring fallen soldiers home. Death began to move out of the home and into the hands of professionals.

What followed was the rise of the modern funeral industry—a professionalized, male-dominated field that reframed death as something to be sanitized, concealed, and managed. The corpse, once cared for by women, was cleaned, sealed, and placed just out of reach. Grief became quieter. Bodies became less visible. Death became something to avert our eyes from.

Nearly 150 years later, something is shifting again.

Grassroots movements, green burial practices, and the resurgence of death doulas signal a return to death as a human, relational experience. And once again, women are leading the way.

The rise of human composting, also known as natural organic reduction (NOR), is one of the clearest examples. Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, helped bring this practice into legal and cultural reality—offering an alternative to cremation and conventional burial that returns the body to the earth as soil. Caitlin Doughty—mortician, author, and founder of the Order of the Good Death—has been instrumental in reshaping public conversations about death through education, advocacy, and cultural critique. [inelda.org]

Together, and alongside thousands of others—death doulas, hospice nurses, social workers, chaplains, doctors, funeral directors, and activists—they are part of a larger death-positive movement that asks a simple but radical question: What if we were allowed to face death honestly, on our own terms?

In From Here to Eternity, Caitlin Doughty offers a striking reframing: decomposition as a form of freedom.

While visiting Katrina Spade during the early days of the recomposition project, Doughty observes that many of the people leading this work are women—scientists, anthropologists, architects, lawyers—women using their education and privilege to challenge a system that has long denied us agency over our bodies.

Katrina notes how relentlessly we are taught to resist aging and decay—especially those of us socialized as female. To soften wrinkles. To shrink. To preserve. Against that backdrop, decomposition becomes a radical act. A final refusal to perform.

Doughty writes of the freedom found in a body that becomes “messy, chaotic, and wild.” A body no longer under surveillance. No longer optimized. No longer judged. In death, decomposition offers a kind of bodily sovereignty that many women are denied in life.

Women are experts at endings.

Our lives are marked by cycles of transformation: menstruation, pregnancy or its absence, shifts in identity, caregiving, loss, menopause. We move through many small deaths long before the final one. And all the while, our bodies are managed—by beauty standards, reproductive politics, medical systems, and the ever-present gaze of others.

So perhaps it makes sense that death, too, would be a place where we seek agency.

If decomposition is the ultimate freedom—returning to the earth without pretense—then end-of-life choices become a final expression of values. A way to say: This body was never meant to be controlled forever.

Today, regardless of how you identify, notice the moments you try to manage your body into being more acceptable—smaller, smoother, quieter, more palatable.